It’s almost funny—almost—watching everybody get all excited and up in arms about the crimes of Paris, as if 129 dead were the World Trade Towers all over again, when it’s just another slow day in the Mideast where the real war is a typical day in the life. I mean: this is nothing compared to the carnage in Gaza, Palestine, last year, when Israel “mowed the lawn” (Netanyahu’s words) with more than 2000 Palestinian bodies, stacked like cord wood or kindling, take your pick, it’s ‘ashes to ashes dust to dust’ every day of the week for the average Palestinian who’s committed no other crime than being born… (More …)

I swore I’d leave politics out of my little Sunday not-so-sermon more-like-a-screed. But it’s hard in this day and age of crowded borders and anti-social media. First decent-comic and B-movie director Seth Rogen brings us to the brink of WWIII with his take on North Korea in The Interview’. Now we have the auto-da-fe by Islamic jihadists upon the staff of the French ‘satirical’ magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The staff of Charlie Hebdo know precisely what the acceptable bounds are, within the Islamic system of justice… and still chooses to press their, and civilization’s, luck. IMHO this is not acceptable. It’s worth noting that their previous lampoons of the Pope and Catholicism stop short of the Pope having sex with under-age choirboys, as their caricatures of the Prophet do, pretty reprehensible stuff, I’d say. That goes way beyond free speech in my book. Scuttlebutt is that they don’t do Jewish stuff, but I wouldn’t know.

Liberalism is dead. That much is obvious, when they are now the super-patriots, marching the streets to show support for the state security apparatus and its anti-immigrant pro-hate stance in the name of ‘free press’. If it wasn’t obvious before, with the historic waffling on NAFTA (ever heard of China, you pro-labor anti-Mexicans?), health care (any is better than none, isn’t it?), Keystone (ever heard of Canada?), and runaway economic growth (aka ‘global warming’), then it is now, with the ‘Islamic threat’.

Bill Maher is the perfect example of this, he liberal royalty, now scared to fly with anybody wearing a robe, and he spouting racial, cultural and national epithets thicker than a KKK member. Liberalism is dead. Old-fashioned notions of ‘free speech’ were never more than a vague ideological ideal, thinly defined and often abused, first crossing the line into pornography and now into hate speech. Hate speech is not free speech. It is terror, and Charlie Hebdo should be condemned for it.

Maybe Seth Rogen was a harmless Teddy Bear caught up in something larger than he, but not Charlie Hebdo. They knew exactly what they were doing. It used to be called incitement to riot. Now it’s called ‘satire’, and it came back to bit them on the a$$. R.I.P. cartoon warriors, may your offspring choose softer subjects. Payback is a b*tch: a batch of contradictions.

If we’re going to survive as a society, a multi-racial diverse society, then people are going to have to get along, dialing down the freedom to provoke, and toning down the freedom to get in yo’ face. We are really a society adrift, in serious need of a new reason, a new rationale, a new religion, a new vision of the future, something we can all share at our highest common denominators, not our lowest.

I don’t enjoy arguing politics with my liberal friends any more than the conservatives. It’s tiring, but necessary, I suppose—for the kids. You don’t want to know what the future archeologists say. It’s all superfluous, if we can only change the time-line. Would that life were as easy as the movies. Where’s Seth Rogen when you need him? I persevere.